5 Disgusting Habits Everyone Has (When No One's Looking)

#2. Nose Picking

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When I was in the fifth grade, I was working on a class project with some other students and was taken by a sneeze of such magnitude that a small ecosystem was dislodged from my sinus cavity and shotgunned out of my nose onto my thigh. Four of us marveled for a solid 10 seconds at what for all the world looked like a banana slug that someone had beat the shit out of, and then one kid started the chorus of "eeews" that children are so fond of when they can't think of something clever to say about banana slugs. I was publicly shamed and never lived down the humiliation until sometime later in the week when everyone forgot about it.

As my anecdote illustrates, people have strong reactions to snot. Boogers, if you will. And despite the widespread social disgust over the idea of anyone even daring to mine for said nose gold on purpose, studies indicate that 70 to 90 percent of adults have picked their nose at least once. And you know that means more than once.

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Thrice a day, every day, bitches!

I submit that people likely pick their noses like starving anteaters sussing out termites on a pretty regular basis when they're alone and, let's be honest, every once in a while you blow your nose so hard that a blood vessel in your eye pops and the clingy little bastard is still lodged somewhere south of your brain and you just have to dig in with a finger to loosen things up. I'll even defend that behavior and support it, just wash your damn hand afterward. That's my motto for inserting a finger into any hole on a human body.

If you need to fully appreciate the scientific relevance of picking your own nose, look no further than the Canadian professor of biochemistry who made headlines recently for letting the world know there's evidence to suggest you can reap untold health benefits from picking your nose and feasting on the clusters of blech found therein. His theory is that, since kids are so drawn to eating their nose nuggets, it may be the body's way of inducing you to consume pathogens caught in the mucus and boost your immune system, which in turn means your immune system is the creepy kid no one sat with in the lunch room. Of course that's just a theory, and if you're a nose picker who eats their discoveries, don't go trying to justify your behavior with that story, it still makes you seem like some kind of forest-born misfit.

#1. Eating in the Bathroom

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Have you ever met someone ashamed of their heritage, and they go to great lengths to try to deny their ancestry, even if we all recognize that person is an individual and their roots don't necessarily reflect who they are as a person? And it gets so extreme sometimes that a person may even attempt to reject their own race by acting out against perceived stereotypes and instead co-opting the traditions and mannerisms of an entirely different race or culture? What I'm saying is my dad eats in the bathroom. Full meals, even.

Now, I obviously have no idea what precisely goes on in the bathroom when he goes in there, other than that he and a plate of food enter, and only he leaves again. He could be scraping that plate, bit by bit, into the toilet over the course of that hour, or he could be sitting there neat as you please with a napkin across his lap listening to a concerto by Vivaldi while he dines and reflects on the nature of mankind's struggle to know the unknowable. Most likely I suspect he drops trou and shits profusely while munching on sandwiches like some kind of poopetual motion homunculus that shames not just me as his son but you as a member of his species.

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My God, this is more depressing than reading trending topics on Twitter.

For a change of pace, while researching this particular phenomenon I uncovered a number of articles that were written solely to tell readers not to do this. They advised that eating in the bathroom was a bad idea thanks to the bacteria in the bathroom, which is a lot like saying don't swim in a shark's mouth on account of all the teeth in a shark's mouth. No shit, son. Or, in this case, shit. There's shit in the bathroom. The bathroom is the room in your house where you intentionally leave your shit, arguably the uncleanest thing you do in any given day. Shit is the opposite of clean. You could scrub a shit all day and never get it clean, it's literally impossible. You'd just end up with a mittful of soapy shit. Gross.

I appreciate the hypocrisy of an article that insists that this is a gross thing everyone does when I start this entry making it clear I don't do this, but shut up. I deal in generalities. And generally speaking, I have evidence that a lot of people do this. Why do you eat on the toilet, people who do this? Do you not know of the shit? Do you not care? Please start caring.

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